Bert Van Bork - Student of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, confidant to Jacques Lipchitz, Joan Miró and numerous artists of the 20th century, nominee by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for Best Short Documentary in 2000 — was himself an artist, photographer, filmmaker, writer and world traveler whose talent and insightful observance of the communities he visited allowed him rare entrance to artist studios within Europe, Mexico, and the United States, including selected Native American villages in the Southwest, as well as to personally interview death camp survivors in the Post War era.

Born in Augustusburg, Saxony, Germany, at the age of 15 he entered and won a statewide competition to study at the prestigious Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste (State College of Fine Arts) in Berlin, where he had the opportunity to join Masterclasses by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, a pioneer of the German Expressionist movement “Die Brücke”. After WWII, he continued his studies at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (College for Graphic Arts) in Leipzig, Germany. Here Van Bork created a series of four woodcuts entitled “Night Over Germany”, namely Widow, Coming Home, Demolition and Amputee. To produce these woodcuts Van Bork was compelled to improvise for the lack of proper materials. He recalled that he had to dig out wooden door panels from abandoned ruins in Leipzig, then asked a local blacksmith to forge a cutting tool from a saw blade for him. Once the boards were cut he was able to make hand prints with ink and a spoon rubbing on newsprint paper, the only suitable paper available at that time. When the series was published by the College for Graphic Arts it was critically acclaimed for its moving interpretation of post war imagery.

The woodcut Widow was selected in 1949 to be featured on the poster for a special post-war art exhibition of the Kunstamt Berlin-Mitte. The figure in the woodcut, contorted with grief and surrounded by flames, gave testimony to the solitary misery experienced by those who lost loved ones in the war. Van Bork's deep empathy called to mind woodcuts created by Käthe Kollwitz and Erich Heckel. Death and despair were understandably recurring themes, not only in strongly executed works such as these, but also in the literature of this period. Berthold Brecht's poems "Kalendergeschichten" (Calendar Stories), inspired Van Bork to illustrate them for one of the few remaining newspapers in Berlin during the immediate post-war period.

In 1952, he escaped from East Berlin to West Germany and made plans to realize a long cherished dream - to visit Italy. The bike he needed in order to travel he built from spare parts, and Adox, the German competitor to Kodak, supplied him with a camera and film to document this very unique, post-war adventure. Van Bork spent many happy months traveling throughout Italy, taking photographs and drawing, he was greatly inspired by the magnificent landscapes and museums. Many of the photographs he brought back were selected for exhibition and received Awards for Outstanding Photography. UNESCO sponsored some of his photographs to be shown at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1954.

Bert Van Bork immigrated to the United States in 1954, bringing with him only a portfolio of his latest works and 20 cents, a going-away present from a German friend. Waiting for him at the New York Harbor was his future wife. They had met as students in Leipzig, and now together, they were able to start a new life on a new continent. After several months spent in New York they settled in Chicago. Van Bork was inspired and fascinated by the Chicago skyline. Having trained in the German Expressionist genre, to him the architecture and cityscapes appeared alive and organic with buildings stretching upwards almost like plants or crystals.

Settled into a new community, Van Bork reflected on his own personal academic experiences and began his diverse career as film producer, artist, printmaker, writer and master-photographer of his contemporaries. He developed a body of work entitled “The Artist at Work”. In 1959 he approached the Lithuanian sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, who lived and worked outside of New York City, with the proposal of photographing him while he worked in his studio and at the foundry. An art book was produced entitled “Jacques Lipchitz - The Artist at Work”, which was published in 1966 by Crown Publishers. A film with the same content followed a few years later, and a lifelong friendship developed. Next, Van Bork visited Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Hans Hartung, Ossip Zadkine, Oskar Kokoschka and Otto Dix. All of them gave their consent to be photographed in their working environments. The renowned mural painter José David Alfaro Siqueiros, who lived in Mexico, also gave his permission to be photographed and filmed in l967-1968 while he created the enormous mural entitled “The March of Humanity in Latin America”, which is now installed at the Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros in Mexico City. The film “El Maestro” was issued in 1969. The book entitled “Künstlerporträts” (Artist Portraits) was published by the Passage Verlag in Leipzig, Germany as part of an exhibition of Van Bork’s original photographs that were shown at the Hörsaal Gallery, University of Leipzig in 2000, and at a gallery in Brussels, Belgium in 2001.

During Bert Van Bork’s 35 year career as a filmmaker, he produced more than 100 documentary and scientific films which earned him numerous national and international awards. Van Bork's film career climaxed in 2000 when he received a nomination by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for Best Short Documentary for his film “Eyewitness, the Legacy of Death Camp Art”. This film examined a unique genre of art and explored sketches, drawings and watercolors (some drawn as tiny as postage stamps so as not to be discovered by the guards), done by the men and women artists who lived and died inside the Auschwitz death camp. This body of work, much of it unearthed for the first time from the Camp Archives, provided chilling testimony to the daily routine of torture and execution. Felix Nussbaum, Dina Gottliebova and Jan Komski were the featured artists who more than 70 years ago lived and documented the horror of Auschwitz.

At home in his studio, Van Bork continued to paint and produce many watercolors and drypoint etchings, taking from the wealth of impressions and sketches that he had collected while on his film trips throughout the United States, in particular the Southwest. His good friend, Hopi Chief White Bear, accompanied him on location during the 1970’s and 80’s, making it possible to film and photograph remote and “forbidden” early Native American settlements in Arizona, i.e. Walpi, First Mesa, Second Mesa, Shipanlovi and Mishangnovi. The fortress-like, very old, remote Hopi village of Walpi inspired Van Bork to produce a wealth of watercolors and drypoint etchings. The latter technique, in particular, was Van Bork's specialty. Carefully conceived and executed, he employed this technique to achieve intense contrasts of light and dark.

Bert Van Bork's body of work, i.e. paintings, watercolors and graphic works, such as woodcuts, lithographs and drypoint etchings, were always concerned with the extremes of our civilization - from the isolated Hopi villages in the Arizona desert to the energetic rhythms and soaring lines of Chicago's skyscrapers, to the wreckage of European cities and culture after World War II - all realized with uncommon refinement, emotion and artistry.

Van Bork’s artwork is represented in many private, corporate and museum collections, i.e. the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin and Dresden, and the Neue Sächsische Gallery in Chemnitz, Saxony, Germany.